President Franklin Delano Roosevelt listened utterly unmoved as one of his advisers regaled him with the awful exploits of a certain Latin American dictator.

"He's a bad guy," agreed FDR, "but he's our bad guy."

Now decades later, the children of Roosevelt's party are listing in bold print the awful exploits of President George W. Bush.

He's an American tough cop, for sure. Following what was more of a police action than a war, an operation that culminated in the arrest of a known, homicidal tyrant and collaborator in the assault on the Twin Towers, President George W. Bush hung in Saddam Hussein's own territory a little too long. There's a price when the police reveal the unappeased rage beneath their exploits.

This rounding up of the rabid Osamists is more like a barroom brawl than conventional warfare. Having been on the short end of a few saloon punch-ups, I can tell you it's not very pretty. You use all the weapons you can find, including humiliating the guy who just disfigured your face. My only highly functioning weapons of self-defense are my words. They'll echo a lot longer in the memory of wannabe Billy the Kids and kangaroo courts than the marks on my face, which have healed.

Following the walloping I received at the hands of four young punks in the parking lot of a bar in Maple Ridge, B.C. — punched repeatedly and then thrown over the top of a car to land like a sack of potatoes on the asphalt — I found the deepest injury was delivered by the Crown Attorney's Office.

"We suggest you relocate, Mr. Moriarty."

Sounds like a bad western, eh? "Be out of this town by sunset, bo-ah."

Well, I'm here to tell you that I'm still here.

In my contented moments, I feel like Gary Cooper in High Noon. In my fretful moments, I just feel like the fool they want me to be.

American Liberals want George W. to feel worse than a fool. Without once referring to the exploits of Osama bin Laden, they want to make George W. look like the "bad guy."

Alright, Liberals, let's say he's a bad guy. However, he's our bad guy. The tough cop on our police force, okay? He's working to save our ass from the barbarous hordes. At the polls, Americans might think it's time for the nice cop, Senator John Kerry, to run the interrogation. We'll know that on November 23.

Unfortunately, the roundup of our enemy's rabid pit bulls is not over. Osama's still at large, albeit under self-imposed house arrest, and Kim Jong Il, the most dangerous of our enemy's attack dogs, is still running sullenly through the North Korean woods. When a dog bites you, you don't talk to the dog; you talk to its owner.

After William Clinton's florid appeasement of Red China, do we really want Senator Kerry talking to Beijing?

Well, say the Liberals, Clinton's policies got us a one-thousand-point growth on the Dow-Jones index, and did so without inflation. He also lowered the crime rate miraculously.

Crime rates dropped in 1930s Rome and Berlin at about the same tempo. There's nothing like criminals with badges to get the job done. The whole shift in NYPD policy occurred under the Bill Clinton/Rudy Giuliani crime bill, around the time I was playing Assistant DA Ben Stone on Law and Order. Read investigative reporter Bob Herbert of The New York Times and you'll see a record of police brutality that makes the American guards in Iraqi prisons look like boy scouts.

As for the prosperity pick-me-up, Alan Greenspan himself said he could not explain the miraculous vitality of Wall Street under Clinton.

The secret was neither trigonometry nor Viagra. The only possible way to get growth without inflation is to cut the overhead. Same price, bigger profits. Nothing like slave labor out of Communist countries to give Dow Jones that powerful thrust.

The "sucking sound" of the sudden loss of jobs that Ross Perot predicted was delayed in deference to President Clinton, who sold the big corporations a sea of sweatshop labor in the first place – all in the name of peaceful relations, of course. The inevitable domestic fallout was then released during George W. Bush's watch. He now has to account for an exploding, unemployment landmine that was set by the Clinton administration to blow up in his face.

All's fair in love, war and politics, I guess.

Is there a "good guy" somewhere in here? Where's Ronald Reagan or Abraham Lincoln when we need them?

The earth is so small these days that any war is a civil war. Regarding China, the only Communist monolith left, we need a miracle like Reagan's. He dismantled the entire Soviet Union without firing a shot. He was "cunning as a snake and as harmless as a dove."

Freeing the Chinese, which is the only glorious task ahead of us, cannot and will not be done as President Reagan did it when he freed the Soviet Union. Russia's self-image is that of a bear. China's is that of a serpent, a Red Dragon, a flying snake with fire passing over its forked tongue. Russians finally discovered that they'd rather hang out with mammals like us than reptiles like China.

What's ironic is that the United States' own self-image was that of a snake, a serpentine mascot on a flag that simply said, "Don't tread on us."

Since then, we have ascended through the entire evolutionary ladder to the aerial heights of an eagle. Everything between the eagle and the snake is at our disposal.

Call it zoological warfare; the animal self-image of a nation is profoundly important. The mascot of the International Communist Party is a COW. That acronym stands for "Communists Own the World."

Check cigarette lighters out of Beijing and you'll see COW engraved in metal. There's a COW ice-cream chain. There are bronze cows all over Calgary, a city known for bulls and beef. The entire concept of socialism being maternal — Big Mamma and not Big Brother, as we mistakenly supposed — a cow could stand as a perfect symbol for the mothering state. It leaves all the citizens big babies to be strapped into their high chairs and safety belts; and since babies shouldn't be raising babies, the state, obviously the only adult on earth, has its day care centers and social workers to do the job.

There are over 300 such mothering, socialist federations ruling society. So, indeed, they're right. Communists Own the World.

"Well," cry the Liberals, "a socialist federation is not Communism."

The socialist federation is the economic foundation upon which Communism is laid. Martial law or a War Measures Act can turn a socialist federation into a Communist state in less than 24 hours. You can't be a little bit pregnant with socialism. The Beast will be born, slouching all the way to Bethlehem.

Well, the World — like Society — is an illusion, according to Margaret Thatcher. In other words, society is a delusion faced with the reality of individual freedom. Yet our college graduates enter the world utterly convinced that the human race can be codified by statistics, millions of them run across the desks of the United Nations and, after a few genocides, considered, in the light of population control, just that many fewer to worry about. Is it any wonder that the human race feels so small and cowardly?

The fall of the Twin Towers was a barroom assault by a gang of suicidal psychotics, drunk on Osama Jihad Juice. It made the St. Valentine's Day Massacre look like Cupid's Arrow. The whole earth witnessed it. However, like the witnesses of my own brutal assault, society says, "I can't testify. I have to live here." However, they can go on and on about how corrupt the victim is.

Yes, I suppose that George W. is a bit of a bad guy, but, at the risk of repeating the obvious, he's our bad guy. He's also our tough cop and the interrogation of the owners of the rabid dogs is not over. Do we really want the "nice cop" to enter the interrogation room to paddy-cake the neighbor who let the dog off its leash?

We've got dogs of our own. Even Texas rattlers, if we need them. Here's my anthem for the coming years of war:

We're North American eagles
And we fly like Canadian geese
But on the ground
We're anything we have to be
To protect our freedom.

It's a mere warm-up for The Battle Hymn of the Republic.

Michael Moriarty is a Golden Globe and Emmy Award winning actor who has appeared in the landmark television series Law and Order, the mini-series Taken, and the recent TV-movie The 4400. He has just been nominated for a Leo Award (celebrating excellence in British Columbia film) for best supporting actor for his work in the film Mob Princess.